Keep It Simple and Fast refers to my focus during development of applications. In my opinion, applications should be very simple to use and do not have dozens of options. Every application should perform very fast, even in high transactions volume or high multi user environments.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Today, somebody in my company reported an issue with opening a ZIP file which he downloaded from an FTP site. He got the error: The Compressed (zipped) Folder is invalid or corrupted.

Situation:
The ZIP file was created by me a few days ago and uploaded to the FTP site. The ZIP file is downloaded and extracted a lot during these days by different people. So why is it not possible to extract the ZIP file on his Windows XP computer? Even when I downloaded the ZIP file on his computer and copied it to my pc, I could open the ZIP file without any error. This confirms that the ZIP was not corrupt. However we were unable to open the file on his PC. The ZIP file was created on my PC with the 64 bits version of Windows 7. The PC on which we could not extract the ZIP, is an 32 bits version of Windows XP.

Solution: Ask the creator of the ZIP file to recreate the ZIP file by sending the files to a compressed (zipped) folder on a 32 bits version of Windows 7.

Now the compressed file can be opened on a 32 bits Windows XP version.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I get the same message with archives created using 7-Zip, but only when the archive file is about 8GB or more. In my case, the solution that’s outlined isn’t practical, because I’m archiving 40 GBs of data at a time and the normal Windows XP compression tool takes almost 15 minutes to perform this process. 7-Zip can do it in about 45 seconds. It seems that some of these other compressions tools, WinZip among them, use more advanced archiving algorithms to handle the ever growing file sizes. It’s unfortunate Microsoft won’t update the legacy compression tool they provide in Windows XP via automatic updates.But I don’t think the problem has anything to do with the OS it was compressed on. It has to do with the fact that the compression tool on Windows XP hasn’t been updated since its release.

Sergio, Their is no structural solution for this. The only thing you can do is to open this file with a newer version of Winzip or 7-ZIP. The compression version of the operating system does not support. it.

About Me

My name is André van de Graaf, I'm working for Exact Software in the Research team as Principal Research Engineering. I'm located in Delft, The Netherlands. In my work i have a strong focus on performance of applications. Beside performance I want to keep everything as simple as possible. What is the perfect balance between performance and functionality?